There’s a new initiative at Microsoft to bring together different parts of the company under a single umbrella to prove the whole is greater than the sum of all it’s parts. The Public Sector initiative, dubbed "The Single View Platform" brings several different Microsoft products together to form a SUPER geographically-based, data visualization product suite. A single, geographic view of complex information and data sets...
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IS Consulting just released the Beta of their MapDotNet UX product and the folks in the GIS world had better take notice. It’s funny over the years how everyone thinks they’ve got the next “Arc-XXX killer,” yet ESRI continues to persevere – they’re doing a lot of things right; however, the MapDotNet UX product certainly should be raising some eyebrows down in Redlands. How’s this for a foundation to power...
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Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink – Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And, with all the water everywhere caused by hurricanes, melting ice, and thunderous storms leading to overflowing riverbeds, it’s only right to visualize such information using a Microsoft Virtual Earth application. The ESRI team came up with a great mashup using a NOAA KMZ (to pinpoint which rivers are flooding), a Virtual Earth...
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The Microsoft Environment Team published a case study called “Studying Climate Change With a SEAMONSTER” which leverages many Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Research personnel, but most importantly Virtual Earth. If you’ve ever seen The Day After Tomorrow, you might be reminded of the kind of catastrophes that could happen due to global warming. Hey, based on information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...
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Earthquake damage assessment just got a little easier. In the spirit of the close of the ESRI User Conference, I figured it was appropriate to post a little something about a GIS application using Microsoft Virtual Earth – enter Inlet (Internet-based Loss Estimation Tool) – okay, my post name is unoriginal. Inlet is a web-based loss estimation and transportation modeling platform used to evaluate whether Information Technology (IT...
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I’ve been hanging out with Ed Katibah in San Diego at the ESRI User Conference and not in the whole two days we stood in our circular booth did he mention this was going down tonight, but whatever Ed! Actually, the booth was so busy, we spent all of about 5 minutes catching up. I digress. After waiting through CTPs, SQL Server 2008 is finally locked down and released to manufacturing. The press release is out – Microsoft Releases SQL...
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There are certain areas of the world where Virtual Earth’s imagery is, well, low resolution. Let’s face it, the world is a huge place and Virtual Earth just having had it’s 3rd birthday is only in the initial phases of rolling out imagery and photography to cover the world. For those of you who just can’t wait, have a specific area you want covered or need more recently updated imagery/photography than what’s native...
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Today, we’re announcing a closer and much deeper relationship with ESRI by integrating Virtual Earth into their ArcGIS Desktop product. As a part of the version 9.3 release, Virtual Earth will natively be a premium content layer so you can simply select to view your data on our roads, high resolution aerial photography and Bird’s Eye imagery. This is different from the “ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for Virtual Earth”...
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Awwwwe yeah, I’m coming home San Diego! I love a free trip home. Microsoft Virtual Earth will have a significant presence at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego August 4 – 8, 2008. We’ve had some strategic announcements with ESRI this year and with the integration of Virtual Earth and ArcGIS Server things just got interesting. At the very least, we’ll have a booth at the show and I’ll be working the...
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Marc Schweigert is trying to replace me as the Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist. I kid, I kid! He has bigger fish to fry, but his passion for geospatial solutions is impressive to say the least. He’s just put out ANOTHER TWO how-to videos about Microsoft Virtual Earth. These videos are only the beginning of showing the power of SQL Server and Virtual Earth coming together to bring simple interfaces into geographic information systems. Not...
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